One Last Path
by rspara
Summary: Au with no magic, no guild, just two fractured souls reaching out. (it's kinda dark, but i spent a bunch of time on it so i think it its pretty well written ;)


(AN: this was a story I wrote for my English class, so it wasn't written with Jellal and Erza specifically in mind, but I think it fits them pretty well. Also, if you randomly see a character named Carlos, im sorry that was what Jellal was originally named)

I propped my chin in my hand and studied the man sitting in the armchair across from me. He was causally lounging, one of his legs tucked up against his body. The clothes that he was wearing were unremarkable, a loose fitting t-shirt and a pair of jeans, but something in his dark brown eyes tagged him as anything but normal. His thin lips were lazily pulled back into a half smile, but there was nothing friendly in it. A single strand of his brilliantly blue hair fell into his eyes and he flicked it out of the way, maintaining his predatory expression.

Maybe my studying was making him uncomfortable, or maybe he was just bored with the silence, but eventually he spoke. "I thought you were here to 'fix' me, but so far all you have done is stare." He said in a bored tone. His voice was deep, but not as deep as I was expecting from the aura of menace he was giving off. I continued my observations for a moment longer, but then I too broke the silence.

"I'm not a doctor, I can't heal you, I'm just here to understand." This was one of the first responses they taught in my therapy class; let your patient know that they are going to have to help themselves to get better. Apparently, this was not the first time he had been through this routine, because he spoke again. "That's pretty much what the last one said too, but he didn't stare as much as you are." I shrugged, tilting my head slightly as I did so, and continued looking him over.

This man intruded me. Jellal, 27, lived alone except for a beta fish, crime: auto theft. That's what the report I was given said, but the therapist that assigned me to him (my boss) had given me some advice. He had said that when he spoke to Carlos, he had gotten almost no cooperation. "In fact," the therapist said, "if you get a single heartfelt smile out of that one, consider yourself a professional." Then he had grinned, and handed me the file. Bosses are like that. Despite my pessimistic boss, I was doing my best to figure Jellal out. He was giving off a confusing mess of mixed signals. He had made his way to me by being deemed "unfit" for jail. This was a fancy way of saying insane, but someone believed he was salvageable. On the other hand, so far I had seen nothing that distinguished him from any other criminal. He was angry, bitter, and probably depressed, but he seemed a far cry from insane. I would have to figure him out as I went.

By now you are probably wondering where we are. Long story short, it's an experiment. A perverse, strange experiment. You see, someone came up with the theory that living a normal and comfortable life will somehow cure criminals, returning him or her to a more law-abiding state. There are a few reasons why this is total bull. First of all, crime is not dictated by personality, and being a criminal is not even close to a mental condition. Secondly, a lot of the people in this place need a lot more help than a semi normal (but still controlled) life, and supervision from a mediocre therapist, can provide. A lot of the people here are angry, and keeping them cooped up to play house is only going to make it worse. But someone with power and money thought it was a good idea, so here we are, sitting in fake leather armchairs on opposite sides of a small, too warm room.

Besides this room, the place they have reserved for the "patients" is pretty nice. The furniture, while bland, is comfortable. Scattered throughout the two buildings this experiment occupies are rooms like this one, meant to give privacy to any therapist-patient pair that desperately needs a place for a heartfelt talk. The rest of the rooms in this particular building are functional, including things like a cafe and a small indoor swimming pool. The other, larger, building is filled with apartments. Each unit is semi-identical, containing a bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchenette. In principal, this is an almost ideal set up, and certainly a great deal for a recently graduated therapist like me. The one complaint I have against this arrangement, is how unbelievably gray everything is. _Everything _in the buildings is a shade of white, black, or grey. From the carpeted floors to the occasional painting on the wall, there is no vibrant color. The very essence of this place almost seems to seep different flavors of uninspiring. There _is_ a small park to the south of the buildings containing a few trees, but seeing as it is late January, freezing temperatures and blowing snow have trapped all but the most daring inside.

A quiet snort of amusement from across the room brought me back to reality. Jellal was looking at me through emotionless eyes, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards into a sarcastic smile once again. I raised my eyebrows in a question and he answered. "You're doing it again. Looking at me like I am a day old loaf of bread that needs to be put out of its misery." I let my own mouth form a small smile at his comment. "Actually," I said, adding some sarcasm of my own, "I was just thinking about all of the wonderful and vibrant accommodations that have been provided for us. I find them slightly boring. What do you think?" I asked the question jokingly, trying to get him to come out of his shell a little, but I could tell that I had landed on something. Jellal uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his grey armchair. "You want to know what I really think?" he asked, fixing me with an intense look. "It's a prison. A prison just as confining as the North Dakota state prison I was scheduled to attend. All the large apartments and dull furniture in the world can't hide that. And you know what? At least a prison has the decency to admit it is controlling you. Here? We are just expected to follow all the directions that you therapists set out for us and ignore our lack of free will." With that statement, Jellal crossed his arms and leaned back, replacing his air of indifference. I sighed, closing my eyes, and leaned back in my own chair.

I didn't have much time to contemplate the complex problem Jellal presented, because at that moment he reached out and grabbed something from the desk next to our armchairs. I opened my eyes reluctantly, and sucked a surprised gulp of air into my lungs. In Jellal's calloused hand, sat a pair of scissors. They weren't intimidating scissors, quite the opposite actually. They were those little kid scissors that occasionally still manage to appear in adult life. With rounded tips, and a black rubber handle decorated with red plastic flame designs, they should have been the farthest thing from terrifying. What made me jump was the way Jellal was handling them. With no effort or concentration on his face, he twirled them butterfly knife style. It was a strange image, the menacing twenty seven year old spinning dull bladed and dull ended kiddy scissors around as if they were the most dangerous weapon in the world. Before my mind could begin to figure out how to respond to this newest development in my tricky subject, a loud knock brought both of our attentions to the door. My recently fried nerves prompted my head to jerk to the right, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Jellal flip the scissors one last time and slip them into the pocket of his jeans.

"Come in." My voice was small and high pitched, but given the mental strain I had just undergone, I figured I was doing all right. The door opened, and a woman poked her head through the gap.

"Your time is up. Its time to head back to your apartments." She said in a bored tone, retreating her head and leaving the door open behind her. I slowly stood up, shooting a quick glance at Jellal. He smiled tranquilly, giving no indication that seconds ago he had nearly invoked a heart attack.

"All right then," I said, pulling a card with my cell number out of my pocket. "Call if you need anything." Jellal took the card, shoving it into the same pocket that contained the scissors, and left the room. I listened to his footsteps retreating down the long hallway, then let out a long breath I didn't know I was holding. All the patient-therapist pairs had already had dinner, so all that was left in the day was sleep. I sighed one more time and left the room, feeling strangely dejected. As I walked through the boring building, I thought about my subject. Contrary to his tough outward appearance, he seemed sad. I don't know what made me come to this conclusion, but it struck me as true. In all of his ranting about prisons and aggressive scissor swinging, he hadn't showed any more than a trickle of emotion. I had been so sure when I got this assignment that I could help him, that I could help anyone. But seeing Jellal in all of his broken glory was making me doubt myself. What if there are some people that are simply hurting too badly to be healed?

As I walked outside, the cold air hit me like a shockwave. With my head down I hurried to my apartment. Half an hour later, I was sitting on my bed drinking tea, my mind still on Jellal. I had just set my mug on a table and turned off my lamp, when my cell phone rang. I sleepily reached over to grab it, knocking the cup off the table in the process. I cursed quietly, then answered the phone.

"Hello?" I asked, a trace of annoyance slipping into my voice.

"Hey." I felt my heart sink. From that one word, I could tell something was very wrong. Jellal, who hadn't let any more than a drop of emotion through his defenses all day, was crying.

"What's wrong?" I asked, my voice hardly more than a strained whisper.

"Can you come? Now would be good." He replied with a shaky laugh. Not waiting for my response, he hung up. I shot out of bed, the knocked over cup long forgotten. Grabbing a hoodie from the back of one of my kitchen chairs, I ran headlong out of my apartment. I stumbled to a halt in front of the elevator doors, frantically pushing the up button. I remembered from one of our conversations earlier in the day that he lived on the fourth floor, in the sixth apartment. When the elevator doors opened, I practically fell inside. My panic was beginning to overwhelm me. I felt like I was drowning, the air in my lungs not enough to keep me alive. The tone in his voice had been scary, bringing up old memories that I didn't want to acknowledge. "Please, please, _please._" I whispered to myself. "Let him be okay." But somehow I knew that he wasn't. Something almost identical to this had happened to me once before, something that I had spent many years trying to forget.

I was eight, living with my single parent mom in a small house on the edge of town. As far as I knew, we were happy. But sometimes I heard sharpness in her voice that made me question who she was beyond her protective parental shell. One day, it got particularly bad. She had just sent me to my room for some small act of childish rebellion, when I heard her calling my name. Just like now, I could tell something was wrong from the tone in her voice. I had raced out of my room and down the short hallway. When I got to her room and opened the door, I found her. She was on the floor, slumped against the wall. Spread all around her were empty pill bottles. Even at eight I had known what was happening. My small eyes had filled with tears and I fell to the ground next to her, wrapping my hands around hers. I struggled with her for what had to be an hour, my high pitched voice screaming that she needed a doctor, and her own shouts telling me no, don't call them. I had reached for the phone, desperately trying to hit those three numbers that would take responsibility from me, but my mother had pulled me back and wrapped me in her still strong arms. My screams had turned into sobs by the time those arms fell away and I could grab the telephone from the wall.

In those few hours, I had lost everything that kept me whole. The ambulance arrived and I was dragged away, but there was nothing to do. She was dead, and I was alone. After that, my grandparents brought me up, but they did nothing to fill the hole left in my heart. The only person I fully trusted for a very long time was the therapist assigned to me.

The elevator doors opened with a ding, and I was racing away. I counted doors one, two, three, four, five, and finally, six. My racing heart filled with dread, I turned the handle. The unlocked door led me to a small living room nearly identical to my own, containing a couch, two wooden chairs with dark grey cushions, and a small TV. The only light on in the apartment was a small lamp on one side of the couch, so it took me a few seconds to find Jellal. He was sitting on the edge of the counter to the left of the living room; still wearing the same clothes I had first met him in. His head was angled downward, and his dark hair covered his eyes. I didn't need to see his face though, so see what had happened.

One deep, dark, glistening cut showed clearly on each wrist. His hands rested in his lap so I couldn't see if there were any more, but from the amount of blood, his intentions were clear. The blood flowed from each arm, pooling on the counter in-between his legs, and dripped onto the white carpet. My brain took the effort to notice this pool of blood, how bright it looked against the floor, and how each new drop changed its shape, giving it an almost life-like quality. It was almost beautiful, this bright spot of red in a sea of grey. Almost. My suddenly tear-filled eyes traveled back to Jellal's face, and with a jolt, I saw that he was looking at me. This time, his gaze held no hostility, just a deep sadness. "Erza," He said, using my name for the first time. His voice mirrored his gaze. No hostility or humor, just sadness.

Whatever trance I had been in was broken when I herd my name. I rushed forward, and wrapped my arms around him, pulling him off the counter and on to the couch. As his legs slid off the counter, they pushed something off and onto the carpet, landing with a small splash in the pool of blood. I had only time to register the silver blades and black and red handles, before Jellal's weight knocked me over onto the couch under him. I was trapped under his body, only able to desperately push at the motionless shoulder that kept me in place. But before I could wiggle my way from under him, he groaned and pushed himself off of me. He slumped in the other direction, the blood on his jacket leaving a bright smear on the back of the couch. I quickly reached over, grabbed his arms, and dragged them into my lap. It was worse than it had looked at first. There was only one cut on each wrist, but they were deep and still seeping blood. I reached into my hoodie pocket looking for something, anything, to stop the blood flow, and felt my fingertips brush over something solid. Relief washed through me. When I left my apartment a few minutes ago, I had hurriedly pulled the hoodie over my head and shoved my phone into the pocket. I pulled the small, plastic object out and typed in the three numbers that I had not been able to so many years ago.

"This is 911 what is your emergency?"

"I am in the big apartment building on Swanson Street, fourth floor, sixth room. A man just tried to commit suicide. Please hurry." My voice shook with tears, and I took a deep breath to calm myself down. The person on the other end of the line confirmed my location, and I clumsily hit the end call button, the phone sliding out of my bloody fingers and on to the floor. I reached into my pocket again and found the object I had initially been looking for, a handkerchief. After some effort, I tore it in half, and wrapped each piece tightly around one of the deep gashes. I held the cloth there with my hands, putting as much pressure as I could on the makeshift bandages.

I raised my head and looked into Jellal's half closed eyes, to find them trained on mine. He gave a weak smile, and let his head fall onto my shoulder. I couldn't bring myself to speak, but Carlos managed it. His voice sounded weak and still carried notes of the intense sadness that it had before, but he no longer sounded ready to end his own life.

"Thank you."


End file.
